CHAPTER ONE
FROM KNOWLEDGE TO WISDOM
In the months before the pandemic of 2020, I had a series of three more visions that became the impetus for this book. The first occurred while I was visiting the island of Ithaca in Greece, made famous as the home and primary destination of Odysseus. I learned an incredible new word while I was there: nostos. Lexicographers may refer to this as an acquaintance or something known, but in the epics of Homer, nostos refers to the love for and longing to return home. After the Trojan War and what we will see was his Hero’s Journey of separation, initiation, trial, and treasure, Odysseus persisted for ten years before he returned to Ithaca and his beloved wife and son.
The power of myth is that it allows us to walk in a hero’s footsteps, so think about what home means to you—the place, people, and state of mind. If you were separated from them for a long time, what creature comforts would you surrender, what unimaginable challenges might you face, in order to return? Put in the context of the soul, we’ve been on a journey since beginningless time, yearning, seeking, but not arriving home. Yet, against unfathomable odds, we have earned this precious human life endowed with liberty and opportunity, and all the internal resources and external conditions are ripe for us to return to the headwaters from which we sprang. Every myth, religion, philosophy, or story throughout time and culture has this archetype of nostos at its thrust: to return home, to return to our spiritual source.
If you visit the Greek island of Ithaca, you’ll find the ruins of Agios Athanasios or Homer’s school, a place of higher learning during antiquity built on the remains of the Odyssean Palace that sits below a more recently constructed Byzantine Church. Within a crumbling third-century BCE stone chamber overlooking Afales Bay, I had my second vision, one that inspired me to shift direction from the two-year curriculum of Buddhist studies I had recently launched. As I was recording a video there to include in our program, I experienced a powerful intuition that caused me to change course, pivoting on a dime. It was the call of the mythic dimension of life. I realized then and there that myths are the archetypal narratives that underlie our rational experiences, connecting us with transpersonal, ancestral, and universal realms, nourishing the soul with symbols and wisdom, which, if applied skillfully, can transform the everyday muck of human misery into the mulch of spiritual maturity. Without the mythological dimension, the soul is trapped behind a perceptual filter, reducing a spectrum of reality into a narrow band of matter that we can only perceive with our five senses—in the same way human eyes see only a fraction of the spectrum of light.
I realized I had been omitting a crucial element from my teaching and—in the video I was recording—I articulated to my students how important it was to include mythology in their studies. Consequently,
I rebuilt my Contemplative Studies Program (CSP), changing the curriculum by integrating three seemingly disparate threads of knowledge: 1) Tibetan Buddhism, 2) the mythological perspective of Joseph Campbell, and 3) the analytic psychology of Jung.
First, the Tibetan Buddhist alchemical art of rebirth, which involves mastering the cycle of three phases: conscious death, sublime liminality, and altruistic rebirth. This Buddhist framework follows the transmigration of consciousness across lifetimes and dovetails with a distillation of Campbell’s mythological cycle, called the monomyth or Hero’s Journey, which offers a neophyte a rite of passage through the three phases of separation, initiation, and return. Both models align with the psychological process of individuation articulated by Jung, which can also be condensed into three phases: from ego, deepening into shadow of the personal unconscious, to the Self in the collective unconscious. These three distinct systems—each divided into three phases—would guide my students and me in a natural progression from the ordinary into the magical world from which we can all return as transformed beings, each a map for navigating the human landscape from delusion to awakening—and it was my hero’s call, a concept I will explore in depth in this book, to synthesize them.
I wasn’t pursuing this convergence of ideas as artifacts of passive interest in the same way people might amuse themselves in an art gallery or museum. What drove me wasn’t knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but creating a practical, unified map that could help us all navigate the actual terrain of life’s struggles, chaos, and uncertainty.
INITIATION INTO THE MANDALA
Despite the consternation of a quarter of my students (who had rightfully expected the original Buddhist course direction) dropping my class, I continued to follow my intuition, a lesson for anyone caught at the crossroads between comfort and uncertainty, loyalty and independence. If we betray our passion to meet the fickle expectations and needs of others, we send ourselves to the cross for crucifixion. As I learned the hard way, we must be willing to disappoint, even disobey, others to follow the never-before-tread path of authenticity. Throughout my teaching career, I had been well-acquainted with the topic and prepared before class, but for this new version of the course, I gave myself over to the unconscious and allowed intuition to be my guide in realms hitherto unfamiliar. I was following the hero’s thread into the labyrinth, and being summoned by some mysterious force from the depth of my psyche towards revealing.
Normally I began each class with a traditional Buddhist visualization, but on the evening before the first course resuming the new term, while alone in my Manhattan office gazing down onto the rush hour streets congested with pedestrians mindlessly circumambulating the concrete towers of financial institutions, I had my second vision. There I saw a mandala—which I later crudely sketched as a series of concentric circles, one within the other, surrounding a central axis and representing the relationship between the cosmos and the psyche. The outermost circle was the ouroboros, the universal motif of the serpent eating its tail, a Chinese, Mayan, and Greek symbol of infinity, the timeless nature of ultimate reality. Within that was the zodiac, with its twelve archetypal symbols and the water bearer Aquarius strategically positioned at six o’clock. Puzzlingly to me was how the zodiac unveiled over time, mysteriously began rotating counterclockwise, yet I persisted in flowing with the vision. This is how the journey of the soul goes—no neat and well-tread passageways to follow. No familiar roadside neon signs.
Within this series of circles was a topical view of the Mahabodhi temple in Bodhgaya, India, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. The temple is built in the classical Buddhist style, structured like a mandala or cosmic palace with four gateways in each cardinal direction surrounded by a series of three concentric square walkways descending toward the inner sanctum at the center. There we find what is known as the Diamond Throne, both a physical site and a universal symbol. The diamond thrown is positioned within the sanctum sanctorum of the Mahabodhi Stupa flanked by the Bodhi tree to commemorate where the young prince Siddhartha Gautama sat and discovered the nature of reality, the actual seat upon which he claimed Buddhahood. As a metaphoric symbol the diamond throne represents the innate potential within each of us to awaken at any moment, reclaiming our royal sovereignty from the tyranny of samsara.
In the vision, I saw the procession of the equinoxes (the zodiac) in its rotation of the Great Year (an approximately 25,800-year cycle—I’ll talk more about this later) spinning counterclockwise. Within the cycle of the Great Year I saw myself walking with pilgrims, circumambulating the Mahabodhi temple three times as we descended together into the inner sanctum. During our first circumambulation we experienced the dissolution of the four elements, one element and phase of dissolution occurring in each of the four directions respectively: earth dissolving into the East, water into the South, fire into the West, and air into the North. As the elements dissolved, our physical bodies died, releasing free-floating consciousness from the binds of material form.
The second circumambulation was a dissolving of the three mental afflictions expressed in Buddhism, the instinctual drives, which contaminate consciousness and distort perception—grasping, aggression, ego-centrism and transforming these base instincts into luminance, radiance, and imminence, and culminating in the pure, clear-light nature of mind known as transparency or dharmakaya.
During the final circumambulation, we took refuge in the three jewels of Buddhism—Buddha, Dharma, Sangha—and generated altruistic intent (bodhicitta) as we continued circling each of the four directions, before entering the final threshold of the Mahabodhi Temple. After making extensive offerings to the Buddha sitting on the Diamond Throne in the inner chamber—reconceived as an alchemical crucible or pregnant womb—we took his nectar blessing in the form of rainbow lights that entered our crown, throat, and heart, purifying body, speech, and mind, transforming us into the future Buddha.